On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 8:10 AM, Hordur Thordarson <hor...@lausn.is> wrote:
> Well, I got the feeling that some users on this list were advocating a > total rewrite asap rather than maintaining and improving the current > codebase. A new Flex framework, built in Haxe or some other language than > AS3/MXML is a totally new framework that will have no support for the > current codebase, which means I'm either stuck with the current technology > or I have to rewrite all my stuff and unfortunately rewrites > just-for-the-fun-of-it are hard to sell to clients. > > I agree that the strategy should be maintain and enhance the current > framework while planning/preparing for the future. > > Yes, unfortunately Steve Jobs managed to kill Flash in mobile browsers > (ok, other things contributed as well :-), so I can't deploy to Flash > player in mobile browsers, but AIR is a perfectly usable solution to that > problem so I can easily deploy to an app for Android/iOS with the same code > base. > Yes, rewrites just for the fun of it are impracticable, but betting on the long term future of Flex as a multi-platform technology on a closed source runtime such as Adobe AIR is a huge gamble. They could do a 180 on their views of AIR next November. Then what? > > > "writing yet another Gui framework on top of HTML/JS/CSS" > > Noone is proposing such a thing. > > Flex needs to be cross platform and with OOP language. > > I didn't mean that a new Flex would be written IN Html/Js/Css. But some > see the solution to the Adobe VM dependency being to deploy to Html/Js/Css, > generated by Haxe or some other tool. I don't, not because there is > anything wrong with Haxe or whatever other tool would be used, but simply > because HTML5 still has years to go before it can support the data-rich > apps that Flex in Flash player/AIR excels at, and that can't be fixed at > the compiler level because in the end you just get Html/Js/Css that the > browser executes, with all the plusses and minuses that come with that > technology stack. > > This view is a little narrow minded. I would say apps like Gmail are pretty data-rich, and it runs great. I don't believe that HTML5 needs years before it is viable for data-rich applications, that is happening now. Granted there are technical capabilities that are yet to arrive in HTML5, but I don't expect it to be years before its completely caught up with Flash Player's capabilities that are commonly exploited in Flash/Flex applications. To put off looking at targeting HTML/JS/CSS would be a bad mistake for this framework, in my humble opinion. -omar
